Ithink I've solved it, but firstly to answer your question - no, I created the Solaris partition using the Solaris installer.
I did some further investigation and discovered that grub was choking on the partition with "error 18: selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS", which of course was nonsense. The "geometry (hd0)" command reported a CHS translation of 1024/255/63 along with <a big number> LBA. This goes against what the BIOS itself reported as the CHS values, which was 16300/255/63. Somewhere along the line either the BIOS or grub gets confused about what the BIOS translated area actually is. The solution was to define a seperate, tiny /boot "slice". Cheers Andrew. This message posted from opensolaris.org
